]]>Time Warner Cable has added a secret ingredient to its growing outdoor Wi-Fi footprint: other people’s hotspots. The cable operator is working with Boston-Tel Aviv startup WeFi to create a virtual network of millions of hotspots its customers can access for free and without ever entering a password.

WeFi has developed software for the handset and network that detects, measures and tracks the signal strength and capacity of millions of deployed hotspots mobile cell sites around the world. The company’s WeANDSF (the acronym is for Access Network Discovery and Selection Function, a mobile industry standard designed to merge Wi-Fi into cellular networks) platform then crunches all of that data selecting the optimal network connection for any given device at any given location and time.

WeFi sells the technology primarily to mobile operators, which use it to offload traffic from their 3G mobile networks to cheaper Wi-Fi connections, but VP of marketing David Fishman said that cable operators have gotten more interested in providing wireless data services. They may not run mobile networks, but cable providers want to encourage their customers to access their broadband connections and video programming outside of the home, making those services that much stickier, Fishman said. Given that the cable companies’ early attempts to launch their own mobile broadband networks failed, Wi-Fi presents itself as a cheap and plentiful alternative.

Time Warner has already launched extensive outdoor Wi-Fi networks in some of its key cable markets, and it has partnered with Comcast, Cablevision, Cox Communications and Bright House Networks to create a 50,000-hotspot joint roaming network. WeFi used its WeANDSF technology to help Time Warner plan its portion network, but it also mined the unlicensed airwaves to find open and reliable hotspots Time Warner can tap for free.

Fishman wouldn’t reveal how many open hotspots it’s adding to Time Warner’s footprint, saying only there were a potential 10 million hotspots in the U.S. that could eventually be included. He stressed that these aren’t residential access point left without password protection, but free hotspots intended to be accessed by the public offered by governments and businesses like Starbucks. WeFi competitor Devicescape already tracks 7.8 million of these hotspots in the U.S., and is adding more to its databases each day.

Time Warner customers don’t have to do anything to access these hotspots. In fact, some of them probably already are. WeFi’s client is already embedded in some of Time Warner’s Wi-F Finder apps, which allows smartphones and tablets to find and automatically connect to the virtual network, Fishman said, and TWC plans to implement it in all of its apps in the future.

]]>Mobile data gateway maker Stoke already has two impressive investors from the telecom world, Japan’s NTT DoCoMo and India’s Reliance Communications, but it’s adding a third. Samsung is making a $5 million strategic investment, betting that its LTE data triage and security technology has a bright future.

Stoke is hardly a new startup. It raised its Series A round back in 2004 from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins. Since then it’s racked up about $97 million, yet has remained relatively quiet except for a high-profile deal with DoCoMo in 2009. But Stoke may have just been waiting for the industry to catch up to its technology.

Stoke makes complex gateways that serve several functions on a mobile carrier’s 3G or 4G network: they can aggregate millions of cellular radio or Wi-Fi nodes, provide secure encryption for normally vulnerable IP LTE data traffic, and can shunt, or offload, over-the-top application traffic to the Internet before it clogs up the network core. Regardless of which use case or cases a carrier adopt the gateway’s central mission to is the handle the enormous deluge of mobile data traffic the smartphone has wrought.

Stoke first started selling its gateway as a 3G mobile data offload element, but couldn’t find any carrier interested, said Dan McBride, VP of marketing for Stoke. Carriers were experiencing enormous traffic spikes from the iPhone and Android devices, but they all said they weren’t interested in investing any more in 3G with LTE on the horizon, McBride said. So Stoke shifted gears and started positioning its product as a femtocell gateway and an LTE security and aggregation platform.

Femtocells didn’t exactly go gangbusters, but Stoke did begin winning LTE deals. The vendor has racked up 14 LTE contracts globally, McBride said, though apart from DoCoMo he wouldn’t reveal with whom. What’s more, with Wi-Fi’s new popularity among operators and the advent of small cells, McBride feels the marketplace doors are swinging wider. AT&T and Sprint are hinting at large-scale small cell deployments and wireline and wireless operators alike are bulking up on Wi-Fi access points– they will need something to secure and direct all of that traffic.

While Samsung’s cash is welcome, it wasn’t necessary to keep Stoke going, as it has been profitable for 18 months, McBride said. “It’s not the money that’s important – it’s not about operational funding,” McBride said. “It’s solely to bring us closer to Samsung.”

AT&T had quite the Super Bowl. At the game AT&T’s networks carried 215 GB of traffic, placed 74,204 phone calls and transmitted 722,296 SMS messages, according to its public policy blog. AT&T reported no problems in handling the traffic and had, in fact, been prepping for game day by adding permanent and temporary capacity. But in what is now becoming a common refrain, AT&T used the event to lobby regulators for more spectrum.

As the mobile broadband data revolution continues, the urgency for new spectrum allocations continues to grow. Despite the National Broadband Plan’s laudable spectrum goals, we have not had a major spectrum auction since 2008 (the 700 MHz auction) and no major auctions are currently scheduled. The spectrum legislation currently being considered by Congress has never been more essential. And as we have argued elsewhere in our blogs, any new spectrum allocations should be assigned via auction without unnecessary encumbrances or limits that hinder any individual carrier’s ability to fully and fairly participate.

… We’ll continue to invest in and enhance our wireless networks, but more spectrum is the only long-term solution to the capacity constraints faced by the wireless industry.

It’s a bit strange for AT&T to use a one-off event as justification for more licenses, since a big annual sporting event is exactly the type of scenario where more spectrum wouldn’t help. Operators scale network capacity to meet average peak demands. If carriers built their networks nationwide to handle Super Bowl-levels of traffic, they would go broke, regardless of whether they had the spectrum to do so. If AT&T had permanently doubled it’s normal peak capacity in Indianapolis for the game, that bandwidth would have sat their idle for the remaining 364 days.

In fact, AT&T addressed the traffic increase exactly as it should have, by bringing in temporary cell sites, or cells on wheels (COWs), deployed 15 Wi-Fi access points, to offload smartphone data traffic and used distributed antenna systems to bring coverage and capacity to every nook and cranny of Lucas Oil Stadium. Afterwards the COWS get packed off to the next event, while the access points and antennas remained place as they’re a relatively cheap way of meeting huge capacity spikes at other events.

What’s perhaps most interesting about AT&T’s figures, though, is the direction that traffic headed in. AT&T reported that 40 percent more data was uploaded than downloaded during the game as customers posted photos, videos and messages. Normally traffic flows in the other direction, which is why networks have been designed to support much greater download speeds than upload speeds. This could wind up being a big network engineering problem for operators as traffic patterns become more symmetrical, especially at big events like Super Bowl. But again, it’s a problem that can probably be solved much more easily and cheaply with Wi-Fi than by loading up on macro-network capacity.

The world will have 5.8 million Wi-Fi hotspots by 2015, up from 1.3 million today, according to a new report from the Wireless Broadband Alliance and Informa Telecoms & Media. The 350-percent predicted increase in hotspots is a testament to the smartphone, which is gobbling up hotspot capacity originally intended for laptops and driving new roll outs. But before you dream of ubiquitous Wi-Fi, it seems not all operators are sold on the idea.

The Alliance’s survey of 259 service providers found that just 47 percent of mobile operators believe that Wi-Fi hotspots are either very important or crucial to enhancing their customers’ mobile data experience, to offloading overtaxed 3G and 4G networks or to providing a jumping-off point for new services. The report concludes this is a positive, revealing that operators are no longer threatened by Wi-Fi and are actively embracing it. But if Wi-Fi is so important to mobile broadband networks of the future, why isn’t the percentage closer to 100 — or at least over 50?

The Wi-Fi-loving operators are obvious. Japan’s KDDI plans to deploy a hotspot network of 100,000 access points, giving it a hotspot for every 320 customers. China Telecom plans to deploy a million of them by the end of 2012. In the U.S., AT&T has never met a hotspot it didn’t like. For years, AT&T has been using its network of 27,000 Wi-Fi connected coffee shops, restaurants and hotels to relieve pressure from the iPhone on its high-speed packet access (HSPA) network. It has also begun to build high-capacity Wi-Fi “hot zones” in heavily trafficked outdoor areas like New York’s Times Square and in public parks.

Not every operator, however, sees Wi-Fi as the answer to its prayers. Verizon Wireless is deploying its own hotspots in stadiums and other big gathering spots, but it’s doing so grudgingly. Verizon Communications CTO Tony Melone has said that while Verizon wants to take advantage of the abundance of Wi-Fi in its customers’ homes for offload, it views public hotspots as a means of solving specific capacity issues in a few problematic areas. For instance, Verizon plans to use hotspots at sports and concert venues where a few times a week thousands of customers converge and simultaneously access the data network.

“We won’t use it ubiquitously to cover up flaws and capacity limitations,” Melone said, speaking at a TIA conference in May. “In my mind it’s much more effective to invest in your 3G and 4G environments than rely on Wi-Fi.”

Another reason some operators may be hesitating on Wi-Fi is that many of the current public hotspot technologies are still half-baked for the purposes of carrier offload. In their study, the WBA and Informa highlighted the U.K.’s O2, which is deploying 15,000 hotspots through 2013. O2, however, has reported that only 20 percent of customers with Wi-Fi connectivity in their devices access its current network of hotspots provided by aggregators. Wi-Fi awareness is high in the U.K., as is customer awareness of O2’s free hotspot service launched in 2008. But the hand-off from cellular to Wi-Fi network isn’t automatic.

Customers must log in to each access point, creating a huge barrier for any customer wanting to do a quick email check or tweet a photo. New SIM authentication technologies are integrating Wi-Fi more fully into the mobile broadband network. Once that hand-off is seamless, maybe the Wi-Fi fence sitters among the operators will become more enthusiastic about the technology.